Andrew, thank you so much for agreeing to come all the way to Stockholm in October for your key note presentation at VQ Forum! Could you please tell us a little bit about your visions for ROSS Intelligence and what transformational benefits you see in the use of Artificial Intelligence in legal services?

Our vision of AI in legal services is one which has lawyers using AI enabled tools to scale their abilities and do more than ever before humanly possible. This means better quality of work as well as the ability for lawyers to serve more clients. ROSS Intelligence will continue to lead the way for AI in law and will be releasing more AI tools and continue to work with great forward-thinking innovative organizations. Eventually ROSS will be on the legal team of every lawyer in the world, so I guess it’s all just a matter of time until ROSS is available in Sweden – it will take some time though!

Which areas of the legal industry do you believe will be most affected by the technological developments?

There likely isn’t one area of the legal industry (ex. paralegals or young associates) that will be more affected than other groups. The entire profession, along with the hundreds of crucial support roles, will undergo some change. But this is a good thing – it means less time spent on repetitive tasks and more time on the sort of exciting and creative work that attracts people to the law in the first place. My advice to everyone in law would be to educate yourself on all the exciting things happening both in AI as a whole, as well as legal technology specifically. The folks that will be having the most exciting careers in 5, 10, and 20 years from now will be the ones that seized the opportunity to grow their careers through AI.

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Today, there is quite a hype for AI in the legal sector and many legal service providers have, or want to, buy AI tools. But often it seems to be without a clear idea on why and how to use the tool, as if it’s more about the advanced technology for the advanced technologies sake, than for achieving a specific result. How do we ensure that the current AI hype does not make us lose focus on the client service; that the reason for using AI is to best serve our clients?

- Hype always is a factor with the release of new technology, if you think back to the release of the television set, the telephone, the computer and the internet, there was a large bit of hype as folks become very excited about the technology without really understanding it fully. Once the hype dies out real applications and use cases begin to be spoken about, leading to wider adoption. As such when I see hype I try and imagine things sped up a year or two and where folks will be with the technology. In order to ensure the hype stays as a positive force (getting folks excited about this new technology) rather than a negative force (not being able to follow through on exaggerated expectations) vendors within the space should aim to not over promise what AI can do and aim to spend a good chunk of their time educating folks on what AI can and cannot do.

- I always say that folks over estimate where AI is right now but under estimate where AI will be tomorrow – that’s why I’m excited to be in Stockholm soon to talk about these new trends and engage in conversation with the awesome Swedish legal technology community!